This is a book about retaining and cultivating
your innate spiritual power. Your power to determine what is true for you. Your
power to determine what success means for you.

I studied truth all my life but for nearly
40 years, I gave my power to others to determine what was true
for me. This
book is about my journey of discovery back to the source of my
own truth. From that place, I now live in a state of success
and prosperity, as I define them.

If some of the things I learned along the
way can be helpful to others, I’m grateful for that. I invite you to take
what works for you and leave the rest. Jen

Foreword

As with many people, my spiritual life
only quickened in the footsteps of an unseen crisis.
In my case it was a crash that took about three seconds, and
gradually, in slow motion over a year or so, completely transformed
me. And my life. It turned my life inside to out. Not inside
out, but inside myself to the outer environment we all so busily
occupy. I was the quintessential 24/7 business professional
entrepreneur. I became a wounded soul. Eventually, I became
a healed soul searching for and living a life of fulfillment,
balanced simplicity and meaningful elegance. My embracing of
a spiritual center for myself came several years ago. I discovered
that living a life of deep truth gave me natural, joyous access
to spiritual and body-sense depths, access to integrating spirit
and matter. When I began living from a place of inner
truth, I became much more balanced. What is this inner truth?
(Jennifer, put in here your perception of inner truth) I
can now support myself emotionally and financially
and I have enough resources to give to others in an ongoing,
natural way. For
the longest time I never thought I would find this place.

When I began living from a place of truth, my life
became easier. and It became much more creative and productive—very
noticeably so. ItMy life became balanced alongin
the full range of dimensions—financial, intellectual,
emotional, physical, sensual, and spiritual. In my view, these
are the dimensions that make up a human life. I have learned
that if any one of them is out of equilibrium, it will tend
to throw the whole system out of balance. Imagine how a right
front tire being out of balance on your car impacts the entire
car’s
mechanics and performance. It is the same with you.

I’m still learning deeper lessons about simple and elegant
living but I feel I know nearly everything about how to live a
complicated and inelegant life. For many years, I lived what
most people would describe as the life of a workaholic. Out
of that way of life came a crash, a death of sorts, and a
rebirth into a new way of living.

For many years, I was the person who liked to try to please
others and give to others. And I didgavegive to
others, but in a very unsustainable way. I believe that many
people live their lives, either consciously or unconsciously, wanting
to give to others. That’s a wonderful intention. But
I learned that in order to sustain any kind of giving over
the long run, one must become a balanced systemone must establish
a means of balancing the elements of life, an internal gyroscope
that is steady and constant.

In 1996 I started a business in the financial community. Our
clients were large non-profit investors—large pension
funds that serve firemen, policemen and teachers were our typical
clients. We also served largesizable endowment funds
and foundations. I employed a staff of ten. The name
of the firm was the eponymous Cooper Consultants and
our primary office was in Berkeley, California.

We consulted to large investors about transparency issues. (Jennifer,
need to quickly define transparency issues here)WeEssentially,
our firm advised them about potential conflicts of interest
in their investment portfolios. It was a niche business in
a very niche area of a supervery wealthy institutional
marketplace.

We wereCooper Consultants was a small firm and,
in working with high-end successful, nonprofit funds, we were proportionately stretched
very (too many very’s) widely. Our clients
ranged in size from about 1 to 60 billion dollars in size.
One client
was had over $100 billion in their investment coffers.I
was the primary person in charge ofresponsible for securing
clients and making sure they got what they paid for. We
were selling business and delivering business to very sophisticated
and very demanding investors, spread all over the United
States. As
you one (consistent third person reference with rest of this
foreword) can imagine, there aren’t too many billion-dollar
investors in each state. So, I was on a plane constantly.
I had the fate of naming the firm after myself. Naming the
firm after me turned out to be a mixed fate or blessing.
Our prestigious clients —which
they all were—expected me to be at all the important meetings.

The firm was quickly successful, by most outward measures
of success. I was called upon to do a lot ofoften invited
as a public speaker and people sought out our the Cooper
Consultants opinions. I have to admit that I loved the
attention my firm was getting. People saw me as successful. Increasingly,
I saw that my company was doing a good thing. We were educating
non-profit investors about how investment consulting firms were
not completely independent (which usually translated to revealing
how firms were not completely ethical). We developed a rating system
that people started calling the “Cooper Rating.” The
rating quickly because symbolic for how ethical a firm was. Our
clients and the people in the industry who sought greater transparency
cheered us on. Other people, who did not benefit
from the greater transparency, worked diligently to snuff
us out. These
polarizing energies directed our efforts even more. Like
the Blues Brothers (this may be an obscure cultural reference
to your younger audience, and you may wish to use one that they
would immediately know), we viewed ourselves on a mission.
At least, that’s how I began to see our work. In
hindsight I can say now that I had a very inflated view of
what I was doing.

In college, I studied biology but then gave it up when I
realized I liked the structure of science - rational thought
- more than I liked the objects (awkward) the actual
forms science was studying. I decided I’d had enough
one day when I was dissecting a banana in a plant anatomy
class. I
left in the middle of the class and changed my major to philosophy. I
got my degree in philosophy.My degree was eventually in philosophy,
which I loved. Soon after graduation, by a series of apparent
coincidences, I was offered a job in with anlarge established
sizable investor and. I took it.

I achieved (and still hold) the Chartered Financial Analyst
designation, which is awarded after passing a rigorous three-year
examination program. This program is for finance professionals
and it is highly regarded in the industry. My hobby
at the time was mountaineering, so attemptingscaling the
challenging cliffs of the CFA exams seemed natural to me. To
prepare for itthe exams, I took accounting classes at night
and structured my a daily self-study program. It took a long
time for me to complete the exams but eventually I did get
mythe designation was
earned. With the designation and some unique
financial work experience, I felt I had a reasonable
chance of success starting a business in the financial community. Over
time the Cooper
Consultants client list grew and we were able to serve bigger
and more prestigious clients. By the time I was viewed as
an expert in my field, it didn’t matter much that I didn’t
have an advanced degree or even a business degree. I had
all the credentials, but deep down inside I still felt inadequate
for the work I was doing.

Somewhere along the way in my life I got on a treadmill of
unconscious competition and unconscious striving. I lived
this out through my work and through my company. Everyone’s
got their own story of what they’re doing that’s important,
how others need them, and how they view themselves as inadequate. For
me, it was a deadly combination that got me off track from
who I really wasmy true self.

All this striving came to a sudden stop for me. At the height
of my company’s success, in 2001, I slammed my car into a
pole in an otherwise empty parking lot. I just didn’t
see it. I didn’t really hurt myself, but it was symbolic
for what was ahead in my life. Soon after the accident, I
began slowing down. My whole body started to shut down.

I realize now that my entire spiritual, emotional, and physical
reserves had been long over-drawn. I had hit the snooze alarm
on a well-balanced life for many years and my life wasn’t
going to allow anymore time for me to get a clue (awkward. Need
something better here)

The first time I consciously remember feeling old and tired was when
I was four years old. I pretty much always viewed myself as an
adult and I left home at a very early age. My parents loved me very much
and my mother, especially, always told me I could be anything I wanted to be. I
studied hard, making plans to go to medical school. However, when it
was time for me to register for college classes, I learned that financially,
I was on my own.

I left home and put myself through college as a cashier,
waitress and then as a bartender. I often pulled double-shifts
on days when I didn’t have classes. I capitalized on
other people’s Christmas vacation and spring breaks by working
their shifts. Loneliness and anger propelled me through
college and my 20’s. I viewed my success in my 30’s
as the beginning of the payoff for a lot of hard work. I
was ready to begin reaping the benefits of all the sacrifices I’d
made over time in my late teens and 20’s. I was not
at all ready for everything I’d worked for to come to a crashing
end.

So it was very confusing to me what was happening to meWhat
started happening to me in 2001 was very confusing and disconcerting. My
body started hurting. My hands and my arms and my legs ached
and eventually went numb. A bone in my foot broke from the
stress of me standing up for long periodsand
so. I started
walking with a cane. My energy was incredibly low. I
continued to get on airplanes and serve clients even while my body
was deteriorating. When I wasn’t in public situations,
I had to lie down. (could be more telling here, more anecdotal)

To understand what was happing to me, I went to doctors
to see what was happening to me. I had some kind of circulatory
and neurological problems that had nodefied diagnosis.
One doctor told me I was likely to have a stroke. My bones
were increasingly brittle and they ached. On
one level it really frightened me. but On another level,
I was in denial, —working
to cover up my numb limbs from my clients and employees.

I began taking my personal power back from this situation
when I made a key decision. Rather than give out more blood
to doctors who weren’t telling me anything new, I decided
to throw myself completely into Jungian analysis. Jungian analysis
is a kind of psychological work that focuses on dreams. (need a
bit more here on Jungian) I’d had nightmares all my
life- of people chasing me in dark places and onto battlefields
and so on. At this point, I was frequently dreaming of my
death. In one of my dreams, I fell down a set of stairs and
died. Other times, someone would kill me—for example, bludgeon
me to death —and I would die. Occasionally, the dream “me” would
float out of my body and watch my death from above and then the
dream would continue, with me laying dead in the dream. To
say the least, this really frightened me. So, the dreams
became my primary focus of understanding my deeper levels of
self. In a real way, it gave me something tangible to
work with.

Through Jungian analysis, I realized very quickly there is
a connection between mind and body. The scientist in me came
alive and wanted to know how my dreams could so accurately predict
what was happening in my life. I started becoming verykeenly interested
in the depth psychological approach of Carl Jung. In my view,
dreams are another data point of what’s going on in a person’s
life. So, you can look to your outer world as a measure of
your level of success and you can also look to your inner world
to see what a deeper part of you thinks about your life’s
direction. Two years after I began, beginning, I
finished my workworking with my analyst. and gainedI
now had the tools to doexplore dream analysis on
my own. I believe that dreams are the truest navigational
system we have as human beings. In this book I talk
more about dreams in this book on page XX. I still
pay very close attention to my dreams and use them
as athe (if
it is primary, has to be the, not a) primary guidance
system for my health today.

Through analysis, I saw that my dreams were communicating
what was going on withinside me at a deeper level. Although
part of memy psyche had been in denial, I realizedthere
was a profound realization that my entire life was changing. I
either needed to go with the change or it was going to get even
harder on me. This was coming from both my inner view and
my outer view. My business was starting to crash, because
I was crashing. Cooper Consultants was a representation of
me. My inner dream life was a representation of me. Every
single point in my life reflected that everything was about to
crash and die. It did.

In 2002, I began dismantling my company. I tried to sellSelling the
company proved fruitless butas there was little
value in the marketplace for an ethical watchdog—except
for one firm who wantedwanting to buy the firm to
dilute the meaning of the Cooper Rating. My employees and
I agreed
that it was better to kill the company than to let the brand
fall into the wrong hands. It absolutely killed me emotionally
and financially and in every other way to dismantle mythe company
that I had worked so hard to build. I felt like all
the sacrifices of my entire life – from my decision not to
have children to every missed spring break and every lost
weekend - were bound up in my company. I felt that I was cashing
in all my investments at a complete and total loss.

It was really hard for me. It was really hard because I cared
a lot about my employees. I cared a lot about my clients,
too. I wanted them all to succeed. Eating crow on all
of those promises of success was extremely difficult for me. I’d
stumbled and fallen a lot over the years but I’d never really
failed miserably at anything before in my life. Having a
public failure was even harder. I felt a lot of guilt and shame.

So, to make a long story short, everything in my life crashed
and burned. Worse, I had no idea what I would be after all
this was over. If I wasn’t Jennifer Cooper of Cooper
Consultants whatwho was I? I had no husband,
no kids, not many friends, no life outside of work. I had
no idea if I would even live through this. I had no idea
how I would support myself. I had no idea what was happening
to me. I felt angry because I didn’t even have a name
for what was happening to me and so I couldn’t really
even even really describe to people what was happening to me.

Now, I
realize now that I was having a spiritual crisis, —which
is what happens when life wants you todemands self-change and when you
haven’t
been listening to your inner guidance system. During this
crisis, I relied on my dreams as a way to find truth. I also fell
backreturned to
thean identity of philosopher. While I had
been in college, I’d
studied Western philosophy, but at this point I began reading
Eastern philosophy. I drank it in. I read and
studied the belief systems of every major world religion,
one by one, attempting to find a truth- any truth - that underlieunderlay it
all. I followedFollowing the
advice of a wise Indian sage I’d discovered andI kept
asking myself, “What am I, really?” (Is
this Who am I? Or What am I?)

I’ve studied the subject of death a lotextensively since
2001 and I’ve learned that every death has within it the
seeds of new beginnings. For me, these Seven Steps to a Simple & Elegant
Life were the phoenix that came out of the ashes with alongside me. What
I’ve realized, more importantly, is that the Seven Steps
are a roadmap for me to a fully balanced and prosperous life.

I believe that I was destined my destiny was to
have myincluded an entire life- crash-and-burn so that I could
fall back to what I truly am and then allow a balanced life
to emerge from ground zero. These steps worked for me and
continue to serve me well. Perhaps they will be useful for
you.

If your life seems stressful and a bit out of balance, you
might want to consider using these steps to make some fine-tuning
and some minor adjustments. If your life seems to be increasingly
out of balance, you might want to look at these steps more deeply. If
you are just beginning your life as a young adult, perhaps you
can use them to side-step the harder parts of life’s journey.

So, that’s what brings me to today.

I understand the pressures and constraints our society puts
on people. I understand how society moves and motivates
men and women to behave in conditioned or expected ways. I
know firsthand howFrom firsthand experience I know we can
appear to be successful and actually be something else underneath
which, in my view, is no success at all. I feel how
difficult it can be to exercise one’s right to be a unique
person in every moment of each day.

I offer
you these Seven Steps as an invitation to find your own place
of truth. I
invite you to live a life that is prosperous, successful, and in alignment
with who you are at the deepest levels of your being. You deserve a unique,
extraordinary, exciting, and fulfilling life. I believe our world is
a better place when we each live our life that way.